Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion by William Faulkner

Author:William Faulkner [Faulkner, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307791412
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 2011-04-06T05:00:00+00:00

When you decide which one you like the best, lets have a talk. I’ve seen some of them myself and can tell you more than the catalogue may have. We should have a banana split too; they may not have heard of them yet at Bennington and Bard and Swarthmore and you’ll have to be a missionary as well as a student.

Then in pencil, in my hand:

Saw you in the alley the other afternoon but didn’t have time to stop. Incidentally, what were you doing in an alley?

You see? The other afternoon, so that it wouldn’t matter when I mailed it: two days from now or two weeks from now; two whole weeks in which to tear it up, and even addressed the stamped envelope, knowing as I did so that I was deliberately wasting two—no, three, bought singly—whole cents, then tore them neatly across once and matched the torn edges and tore them across again and built a careful small tepee on the cold hearth and struck a match and watched the burn and uncreaked mine ancient knees and shook my trousers down.

Because it was May now; in two weeks she would graduate. But then Miss Eunice Gant had promised to send the dressing case yesterday afternoon and grüss Gott they had invented the telephone too. So once more (this would be the last one, the last lurk) to wait until half past eight o’clock (the bank would not open until nine but then even though Flem was not president of it you simply declined to imagine him hanging around the house until the last moment for the chance to leap to the ringing telephone) and then picked it up:

“Good morning, Mrs Snopes. Gavin Stevens. May I speak to Linda if she hasn’t already … I see, I must have missed her. But then I was late myself this morning … Thank you. We are all happy to know the dressing case pleased her. Maggie will be pleased to have the note … If you’ll give her the message when she comes home to dinner. I have some information about a Radcliffe scholarship which might interest her. That’s practically Harvard too and I can tell her about Cambridge … Yes, if you will: that I’ll lasiting for her in the drugstore after school this afternoon. Thank you.”

And good-bye. The sad word, even over the telephone. I mean, not the word is sad nor the meaning of it, but that you really can say it, that the time comes always in time when you can say it without grief and anguish now but without even the memory of grief and anguish, remembering that night in this same office here (when was it? ten years ago? twelve years?) when I had said not just Good-bye but Get the hell out of here to Eula Varner, and no hair bleached, no bead of anguished sweat or tear sprang out, and what regret still stirred a little was regret that even if I

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